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Students' prior knowledge

Students' prior knowledge

Sep 05, 2012

Principle 1: Students’ prior knowledge can help or hinder learning.

What you can do in the classroom

Examples

What you can do in the classroom

Examples

Gauge prior knowledge

  • Administer low or no-stakes diagnostic to get a sense of student preparedness. 

  • Have students brainstorm a topic in groups to uncover beliefs, assumptions, and associations (e.g., "What do you already know about ..." or "What comes to mind when you think of ...").

Activate accurate prior knowledge

  •  Explicitly link new material to prior content from the course ("Where have we seen this before?").

  • Use analogies to connect course content with everyday knowledge

Address insufficient prior knowledge

  •  Be sure to differentiate declarative (knowing what and why) from procedural (knowing how and when). Your students may know certain facts but may not know how to use them.

Correct inaccurate knowledge

  •  Have students make and test predictions. When evidence contradicts beliefs or expectations you can help them see source of error.

  •  Provide checklist or set of rules to help students determine if prior knowledge is relevant to a given problem or question.

Adapted from How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (2010, Ambrose et al.)

 

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